title: "Understanding Conversational Programmers: A Perspective from the Software Industry"
authors: Parmit K. Chilana, Rishabh Singh, Philip J. Guo
venue: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)
year: 2016
tweet: "Conversational programmers are professionals who learn to code to communicate better with engineers"
abstract: >
Recent research suggests that some students learn to program with the
goal of becoming conversational programmers: they want to develop
programming literacy skills not to write code in the future but mainly
to develop conversational skills and communicate better with developers
and to improve their marketability. To investigate the existence of such
a population of conversational programmers in practice, we surveyed
professionals at a large multinational technology company who were not
in software development roles. Based on 3151 survey responses from
professionals who never or rarely wrote code, we found that a
significant number of them (42.6%) had invested in learning programming
on the job. While many of these respondents wanted to perform
traditional end-user programming tasks (e.g., data analysis), we
discovered that two top motivations for learning programming were to
improve the efficacy of technical conversations and to acquire
marketable skillsets. The main contribution of this work is in
empirically establishing the existence and characteristics of
conversational programmers in a large software development context.
bibtex: >
@inproceedings{ChilanaCHI2016,
author = {Chilana, Parmit K. and Singh, Rishabh and Guo, Philip J.},
title = {Understanding Conversational Programmers: A Perspective from the Software Industry},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
series = {CHI '16},
year = {2016},
isbn = {978-1-4503-3362-7},
location = {Santa Clara, California, USA},
pages = {1462--1472},
numpages = {11},
url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2858036.2858323},
doi = {10.1145/2858036.2858323},
acmid = {2858323},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
keywords = {conversational programmers, non-CS majors, programming literacy, technical conversations},
}